Skeletons In The Closet, Monsters Under The Bed
by Ruze a Koure
Summary: After the death of her grandmother, a young girl raised in an abandoned temple in the middle of nowhere discovers a dying raikou that simply refuses to die, and struggles to understand the dark family secrets that her grandmother took to her grave.


We planted my grandmother's bones deep in the earth, with a knife in her pocket so she could cut her way through Purgatory and a pair of freshly-cut swanna wings in her arms to ensure her flight to heaven.

My grandmother had not been a good person, so she would need all the help she could get.

Afterwards, I crouched at the bottom of the temple steps and flicked pieces of swan meat at my rattata, Nezumi, until the dusk had grown bloody along the horizon and my mother had stomped her way across the courtyard with the swanna skeleton over her shoulder to deposit it in the river so that it could flow towards the sea and be reborn anew.

It was all superstition, really, but what more could be expected from a family that lived in the hisashi of an ancient temple?

Nezumi soon grew skittish at the shadows that danced at the edge of the courtyard, where the crumbling wall met the forest. He crept closer to me and tucked himself in next to my leg so that he could peer down the steps at the lonely creature casting the shadows.

My grandmother had cared for her furret, Bandhu, since the girl had been ten and the pokémon newly hatched. I hadn't considered what kind of an effect her death would have on the creature - but what other life had she ever known? My grandmother had spent more time with Bandhu than with any of us left living.

"Bandhu," I called softly. And then again, louder, I called, "Bandhu!"

No response. She was lost, adrift in her own mind as she paced the boundaries of my grandmother's unmarked grave. After only a few moments of trying to coax her closer, I grew bored, and, moving Nezumi from my lap, I stood and entered the temple again to find something to pass the time. I had spent so long caring for my grandmother in recent years as she withered away to air and unfulfilled ambitions, that I knew little how to fill my spare time.

Her room had been left as it had been when she died - a blanket folded neatly over her sleeping mat and the stone tablets she had taught me to translate stacked high next it. I folded myself to the ground with crossed legs and reached for the closest tablet so that I could rest it on my lap and trace my fingers along the letters my grandmother had pored over for years.

She had not been an archaeologist, nor an explorer of any kind - not that I knew, at least. For as long as I could remember we had eked out a quiet living in this abandoned temple, sweeping the steps clean and caring for the shrine, sleeping on the floor of the corridor for a few sparse hours of the night until we rose again before dawn. She had found the tablets in the tiny space below the ground, a cabinet lined with shelves on which sat miniscule jade pikachus and gold toe rings and long loops of silk ribbons, and without warning, she set about translating them, leaving the temple to me.

I had not asked questions, ever. What kind of a child asked questions about the only life they have ever known?

I spent perhaps a half hour reading the glyphs on the tablet that told the story of the temple, and how it had hosted the corpses of the dead pokémon of the province, and how when the night had fallen and someone who did not belong in the temple trespassed there, the skulls would begin to speak. Whatever truths they spoke must have been terrible indeed. I could not read the story without remembering my grandmother's husky voice telling it to me - how her voice was sing-song and quavering, so unlike my mother's steady tones. My grandmother would wait for the end of the story and then smack her hand on the floor beside my head, and cry, "Can you hear them, child? Can you hear the dead approaching? They know we don't belong here yet!"

_Yet._

But there was only so long I could spend reading a story so well known, no longer how much I sought comfort following the loss of the only constant in my life.

My mother had appeared when I was nine, intermittently at first and then suddenly she was a permanent fixture and it was as though she had always been there - teaching me to coax rattata closer with berries and meat, or how to fish for butterfree with nothing but a piece of twine and a knot of flowers, or how to climb onto the roof of the temple so that I could see how the mountains and forests went on for as far as the eye could see, split only by the silvery thread of the river about ten miles away. My grandmother had raised me and cared for me, but my mother had tamed a half-feral child and shown me her own kind of strange sweetness, despite her naturally brusque disposition.

I went to sweep the steps as night drew to a close, finding some degree of solace in the idea of following our routine, but even as I walked onto the top of the steps with my broom in hand, I could tell something was wrong.  
>Nezumi was bleating his cry and Bandhu was echoing it, staring into the darkness of the forest where the strange shapes of shadows and shades danced and swayed. I crossed the courtyard to Bandhu, and crouched down to her level to see what she saw.<p>

And what I saw was all of the pokémon of the forest flocking away as fast as they could.

A dark cloud of beings - pidgey and hoothoot took wing as sentret and furret flooded past. A strange silvery shape hung in the air for the briefest moment, and then dissipated as a poochyena pack crossed my line of vision in the direction of the river.

A movement in the corner of my eye, and then Nezumi was gone as well, slithering past my ankle despite my cry, and I could tell that Bandhu wanted nothing more than to follow. I turned towards the temple in an attempt to discern what they were running from, but could see nothing amiss - they were running towards something.

_Grandma_?

"Well, come on then," I said finally to Bandhu. "Let's see what's going on."

And we delved into a forest starlight did not dare enter.

It was ten miles to the river, a trip that usually took me the better part of two hours, absentminded as I was - I would pause to pick flowers for the shrine or taste berries or follow a shinx to its nest so I could see the babies playing. Now, swept up as I was with the pokémon's hasty flight, I found myself lengthening my stride and slipping into a run, with Bandhu at my heels, trailing behind the pokémon and then slipping in amongst the slowest of them. In the forest, the only light came from the pokémon themselves, so I focused on that and I wondered.

The forest whipped past. They were taking another route to the river, one unfamiliar to me, and the excitement passed the time like it was nothing.

The woods opened abrubtly onto a steep, sheer valley, on the floor of which the steel water flowed. I could see no sign of my mother or the skeleton she had gone to dispose of - only a dark shape, too large to be any kind of human, at the river's edge.

I drew closer to the slope, crouched and peered down, trying in equal parts to identify the object and quell my disappointment that my grandmother had not returned in some incorporeal form to chide me some more.

A cloud slipped away and unveiled the moon, sending light spiralling across the river. I could suddenly see what crouched at the river's edge, something I had seen etched into so many temple illustrations, and my heart leapt into my throat.

Raikou, the legendary pokémon, was dying only four hundred metres away from me.


End file.
